Mars Watch is now LIVE on Kickstarter!
I need your help to promote this campaign!
Real talk: I am absolutely sweating bullets over whether the Mars Watch Kickstarter is going to make enough money for me to actually pay myself.
If I wanted to maximize profits, I should have been running it at conventions prior to launch to build up buzz - which is what I did for the first edition. I ran easily more than 100 hours of sessions of The Watch in advance of that Kickstarter. But since Mango Mussolini took office, it's just not safe for me to travel to the States anymore:
1. I have been too vocally queer and leftist online for too long to feel safe crossing the border.
If ICE can disappear straight blonde white women at the border, it's definitely not safe for my trans ass.
2. GenCon, the biggest games convention in North America, is in one of least trans-safe parts of the country. I'm FROM Ohio, and can't imagine feeling safe to ever go back.
3. While the map makes New York and Pennsylvania look safe by comparison, rural NY and PA are terrifying - the last time I made the trip to my favorite con in NJ, I passed a literal 10 foot sign in someone's front yard while driving through rural PA. That was the trip I drove 5.5 hours without stopping because I was too scared scared of getting hate crimed in an area with no cell reception to pee at a rural rest stop.
Unfortunately, Ontario has ONE TTRPG con (which I can't attend for other reasons), meaning I just CAN'T run games at cons.
Because I lost most of my games audience when Elon Musk bought Twitter, my initial funding goal is ONLY to cover platform costs + the cost of hiring Claudia Cangini to do new art + paying my editor - I’m gambling that enough people will back to be able to pay myself up front, or that I’ll be able to make money on the back end. Which is a calculated risk, but still a risk.
